Chrono Trigger is a mix of a random battle turn based RPG and action turn based RPG. It was a Super Nintendo exclusive title at first in 1995 when it was first released but made its way onto PlayStation systems in 1999. You may recognize that art style because it comes from the some of the same people that created Dragon Quest and the Dragon Ball animated series. Chrono Trigger is still look at as one of the best RPG’s of all time. Chrono is on his way to the Millennial Fair when an experiment by his best friend Lucca accidentally opens a portal to the past. While traveling through time from 65,000,000 BC to a future time with robots and humans are living separate from each other he realizes that something is wrong with the timeline or someone is trying to change the timeline. He decides to try to fix the problems but he could make things worse.

Chrono Trigger’s story takes the idea of messing with time travel and makes it easy to follow and understand. That is a huge statement since there is no voice acting and the game deals with several points in time. Your team is very diverse; there is a robot, a knight that is a frog and a vampire of some sort. Creative characters and creativity is a key factor throughout the whole game. Chrono Trigger was released in 1995 like we said and even still has things about it that has been duplicated but yet to be imitated. Like for example there are several different endings to the game but about half way through you get access to the final boss and you can fight it at any time after that. There are also seven dungeons that are optional but they are all time travel related and have something to do with each of the people in your group, so it feels like these optional ares are part of the main story, still an idea unique in gaming.

The battle system is unlike anything else we have played before. First there are no battles when traveling between areas. You get to go from town to town and cave to cave without worrying about being attacked. We were able to explore openly and found stuff we could have missed. Your foes are a mix of walk up and trigger the battle or they will jump out of nowhere and attack you. This mixes up the combat and even though it is repetitive it is never boring and you want to keep playing and fighting as many times as you can. There are also combo attacks that are different depending on what three team members you take with you. There is a point in the game where you don’t have to have Chrono in your group giving you a lot of options, this also makes leveling up more fun because you want to unlock all of the combos between characters.

Chrono Trigger is 20 to 23 hours long the first time through and that is a little short for an RPG even one from the mid 1990’s. But the fun and replay factor is really high. There is also a New Game+ mode and that is very rare for RPG’s in general. You replay this game for fun of it and not for the other endings; you can just watch them online. The only problem we had was sometimes you have no idea where to go but that problem has been fixed thanks to the internet. We have played Chrono Trigger back in the day on our SNES and now on newer systems and we would still play it all over again. Worth spending the money, price is not a real big issue here. Keep your cost under $10 and it will give you hours of gaming and sales do happen, you can get this game for under $5. This is a most own for any classic RPG gamer or any classic gamer period.